Hard Drive Maintenance (OSX-Panther)

It started acting funny, and by that I mean I turned on the powerbook, 5 minutes later I opened a jpeg in photoshop cs, edited it a bit and hit save, then the hourglass ball thing started rotating for a few minutes and then all the desktop icons disappeared, folders closed, and the top finder menu bar went translucent.

its working ok now, but it happened twice and i got to thinkin', what if i have to fragment my harddrive?

No, not fragmentation. OSX defragments the drive automatically. For basic maintenance, I recommend running AppleJack about once a month. Fixes most of the problems that crop up in OSX and cause slowdowns and other weird issues.

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